In the course of my recent work, integrating various java libraries with clojure, I spent a lot of time going back and forth between emacs and firefox, just to read java api documentation. I even tried loading up the "All Classes" index from the java api docs in an emacs/w3m buffer and isearch-ing through it. It was a far from optimal experience, and I decided to hack something using clojure and slime.
Bill Clementson had posted a great intro to javadoc and clojure/slime, but I was looking for something that wouldnt' require me to leave emacs just to read documentation, and that too java api docs.
Ideally, I wanted to be able able to put the cursor on any java class
symbol in a clojure-mode buffer in emacs, execute M-x slime-javadoc,
and have the api documentation popup in an adjacent emacs window.
Turns out the hardest part of implementing this was in resolving an unqualified class name to its fully qualified form, before looking up its documentation path. For example,
(ns example (:import (java.util UUID))) (defn uuid [] (.toString (UUID/randomUUID)))
Looking up the javadoc on UUID should really be on java.util.UUID,
which clojure knows. So, the core of the hack is a clojure function,
which takes the symbol at point ("UUID" in this case), and the current
namespace ("example") and returns a fully qualified class name
"java.util.UUID". That function, implemented as a slime command looks
like the following:
(swank.commands/defslimefn resolve-symbol [sym ns-name]
(when-let [the-class (ns-resolve (find-ns (symbol ns-name))
(symbol sym))]
(.getName the-class)))
Now all we need is emacs to clean up the symbol at point, and call this function via slime.
(defun slime-javadoc (symbol-name)
"Get JavaDoc documentation on Java class at point."
(interactive (list (slime-read-symbol-name "JavaDoc info for: ")))
(or symbol-name (error "No symbol given"))
(let ((class-name (slime-eval
(list 'resolve-symbol
(first
(split-string (trim-trailing-dot symbol-name)
"/"))
(slime-current-package)))))
(if class-name
(browse-url
(concat (javadoc-root class-name)
(subst-char-in-string ?$
?.
(subst-char-in-string ?.
?/
class-name))
".html"))
(message "No javadoc found for %s" symbol-name))))
The javadoc-root function is just a way to dispatch to different
javadoc paths (local or online), based on the package names. For
example, by defining:
(setq javadoc-alist
'(("^\\(java[x]?\.\\|org\.ietf\.\\|org\.omg\.\\|org\.w3c\.\\|org\.xml\.\\)" .
"file://opt/java/docs/api/")
("^org\.jets3t" . "file://opt/java/jets3t-0.7.0/api-docs/")
("^com\.xerox\.amazonws" . "file://opt/java/typica-1.5.2a/apidocs/")
("^org\.mortbay" . "http://www.mortbay.org/apidocs/")))
Now, emacs/w3m will load the right documentation, based on the class package prefix.
The code is available on github.
Unity.